When Life Shakes You Down
In early December of 2021, I languished in a hospital bed for nine days. An infection was carved out of my body, but the more serious malady was an adverse reaction I had to a dye used in CT scans. It was the scariest time, the medical trauma of which has only recently fallen off. It took me a full year to go from feeling fragile in the least exquisite, unchandelier-like way possible to physically and emotionally capable in a way that couldn’t be dialed back to zero by a single bedside memory or twitch of scar tissue.
These kinds of experiences are rightly unforgettable. All we can hope for, if hope is even appropriate, is that our memories scald us less and less over time, and that we learn something from our brushes with frailty — or reality, really. If we’re lucky, life is good at spinning us far up and away from the fact that anything can level us at any given moment. As I write this, I realize how much it reeks of privilege. Many of the young people I work with live in constant fear of life itself decimating them, like an autoimmune disease flaring up at the first sign of comfort.
For most of 2022, I sat patiently with my uncomfortable memories of being suddenly unwell. They were complicated, peopled by doctors and visitors coming and going, yet incredibly lonely. I had flashbacks of crying in my hospital bed, worrying about how my parents would feel if something truly catastrophic happened to me. Then someone or something bright would pop up, like Peter the Korean-American dietician who saw the fear in my eyes during one of his rounds and starting coming up to pray with me in the evenings. Life always zigs and zags, but being jerked from despair to hope on a pill schedule was exhausting.
About halfway through my stay, as I stared into the abyss of fear one night of not knowing what was wrong with me, it dawned on me that I had gone through something serious and that I wouldn’t be pas de bourréeing out of the building the second I got discharged. My small wound became a portal of anxiety that prickled up me, pressing its way through my chest and into my head, enveloping even the small peace of tiredness I had with the deafening terror of the unknown.
I sucked on my hundredth mini apple juice box as a counteraction when I heard a woman in a room down the hall start wailing through what sounded like a serious mental health episode. Hearing her express how my body and mind felt was unnerving. It was equalizing and I’m ashamed to say that made me uncomfortable.
That’s often what our most humanizing experiences do. In one fell swoop they dismantle the structures we put in place to distance ourselves from one another, leaving us stupidly alone in our shared humanity.
I got up to walk around. I had so much saline in my body that I made it a point to marathon around the floor as often as I could. I spent time in the chapel, rolling my IV in, hoping I could be alone in there with whatever spiritual energy was left behind. Grief, fear, despondency, surrender — these are all just different flavors developed on the arc of the same prayer.
I circumambulated the general ward five times, passing by rooms with intense PPE and biohazard markers, eventually locking eyes with a patient in restraints. “Help me out of here,” they said, “here” being not a place, but a predicament. I was projecting, but even still it was one of the most real moments of my life, this flash of a second where, short of varying prognoses, this woman and I were reduced to a shared affliction — life had brought us to our knees at the exact same time.
I stayed in the grip of fear for months after getting discharged, not really trying to reclaim the ground I had lost in terms of physical and emotional endurance. I knew being idle would be the most challenging thing for me, but I felt I owed my experience and body that. So I read books, ate exceptionally well, and grieved my ignorance.
I often feel that this we miss this about life. We don’t give the experiences that deserve a second look the attention they’re owed. Instead we take them as a signal to “live life to its fullest,” whatever the hell that means. We buy into this cowardice in droves, calling it positivity. Yet what can be more full than settling into life’s bleakest corners from where light is most sharply visible.
